Samsung SSD 950 PRO M.2 Review: Affordable, Ultra Fast Storage

Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a separate drive used for the OS and benchmark installations. Out testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available at the time of publication and AHCI (or RAID) mode was enabled. The SSDs were secure erased prior to testing, and left blank without partitions for some tests, while others required them to be partitioned and formatted, as is the case with our ATTO, PCMark 7, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test.

HotHardware Test System Intel Core i7 and SSD Powered

IOMeter I/O Subsystem Measurement Tool

As we've noted in previous SSD articles, though IOMeter is clearly a well-respected industry standard drive benchmark, we're not completely comfortable with it for testing SSDs. The fact of the matter is, though our actual results with IOMeter appear to scale properly, it is debatable whether or not certain access patterns, as they are presented to and measured on an SSD, actually provide a valid example of real-world performance--the access patterns we tested may not reflect your particular workload. That said, we do think IOMeter is a reliable gauge for relative available throughput within a given storage solution. In addition there are certain higher-end workloads you can place on a drive with IOMeter, that you can't with most other storage benchmark tools available currently.

In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; our custom Workstation pattern, with an 8K transfer size, 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and a 4K access pattern with a 4K transfer size, comprised of 67% reads (34% writes) and 100% random access.

The Samsung SSD 950 PRO M.2 put up some impressive numbers in our IOMeter testing, but it wasn't quite able to catch the Intel offerings with either access pattern. In comparison to the other M.2 or PCIe drives, however, it was no contest.

The overall bandwidth numbers tell a similar story--the Samsung SSD 950 PRO M.2 easily outpaced the previous-gen 850 EVO and Kingston Predator, but it couldn't quite catch the Intel SSD 750 series drive. And the enterprise-class (and WAY more expensive) P3700 was in another league.